As a co-founder of Basho Technologies, the company behind the Riak database, Antony Falco observed that companies already had lots of databases. It makes sense, given that not every database was created equal. But Falco noticed an inherent structural problems with using multiple databases.
Keeping data isolated inside any one database prevents companies from making discoveries across multiple data sets. Plus, he said, at least one database tends to have trouble at any given time.
Earlier this year, Falco started Orchestrate.io to respond to these issues. The company provides a single API through which customers can send data from multiple databases. This way, customers can join, say, geolocation data, time-series data and tweets, drawing graph relationships and doing full-text searches on top of it all.
To build out the infrastructure to do this with multiple cloud providers and bring on customers, Portland, Ore.-based Orchestrate.io is taking on $ 3 million in seed funding. True Ventures is leading the round (see disclosure) alongside contributions from Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners.
Some companies were already testing out the Orchestrate.io service, although Falco declined to identify them. He said the price of using the service is tied to the number of queries per second customer make.
When it comes to competition, Falco said, “Certainly there’s Amazon.” On Amazon Web Services, customers can get a slew of tools, from RDS for relational databases to DynamoDB for nonrelational work to Elastic MapReduce for Hadoop. And, of course, if companies don’t buy into the Orchestrate.io logic, existing databases constitute challengers. But Falso has an answer for that. “Databases can do most of these queries,” he said. “The problem is, they can’t do them efficiently and at scale at the same time.”
After the company comes out of private beta, Falco thinks Orchestrate.io has the potential to be a go-to provider for lots of different kinds of data-analysis services, Falco said, just as companies look to Twilio for voice services and SendGrid for email. “(There’s a) shift of operational burden from a corporation or the end user to a service provider,” he said. “I think we’re just part of the trend. You’re going to continue to see that over the next several years.”
Disclosure: Orchestrate.io is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM. Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
- What’s driving the next phase of the e-commerce evolution
- The Red-Hot Data Warehouse Market: Who’s Buying Next?
     |